Environment, Economics and the Up Side of Down

Those who have lost jobs or investments because of the 2008 global financial crisis may not find much consolation in the realization that they are contributing to the environmental health of a finite planet. But the reality is that the world-wide economic downturn has cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduced pollutants and slowed resource consumption to an extent never managed by other measures of restraint.

If you happen to live in Baikalsk, a scenic resort in Siberian Russia, you will notice that the air is now clean, pollution of the local lake has stopped and both birds and tourists are returning to the town. This follows the November closure of the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill, a Soviet industrial monstrosity that has resisted any form of clean up since at least 1964. The recent economic downturn fixed what many years of environmental lobbying was unable to even budge.

If you happen to live in Campbell River, a small but beautiful seaside city on Canada's West Coast, the view to the north is no longer blighted by billowing effluent from the Elk Falls Pulp Mill. The economic downturn has fixed ‹ at least, temporarily ‹ the city's notable source of pollution, everyone is breathing pristine air again and cleaner economic opportunities are being solicited.

Elsewhere on the planet, the economic downturn has had more dramatic effects on pollution reduction. In China's Zhejiang province, 60,000 small and dirty factories have shut down, with thousands more in the Pearl River Delta and 2,200 in just one industrial city, Dongguan. In Mexico, factories are producing 40% less goods for American consumption. In India, so many small steel-rolling mills around Delhi have shut down that local atmospheric sulphur dioxide levels have fallen by 85%. In Brazil, a 50% collapse of beef prices has reduced by 70% the expansion of grazing land into the endangered Amazon rainforest. In America, the critical condition of the auto industry could mean that the stubborn manufacture of its gas-guzzling vehicles is just a few months from coming to an end. In Canada, reduced lumber output is keeping thousands of tonnes of carbon sequestered in forests, and the collapsing price of oil has essentially halted expansion ‹ and pollution ‹ at the Alberta tar sands. In Europe, the depressed economic activity is expected to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 100 million tonnes in 2009, with the same amount expected in the United States. Worldwide emission reductions are expected to be substantial as they follow declines of nearly 10% in global GDP and 3% in oil consumption (Newsweek, Mar. 16/09).

Meanwhile, the G-20, a group of the world's largest industrial economies, hastily convened an April meeting for the purpose of fixing the financial and economic mess. What to do? The solutions seem to fall into two basic categories: regulate the banking system so this problem of uncontrolled excesses doesn't occur again; and stimulate consumption so production will once again invigorate the world's economies. Regulating banks makes sense. Stimulating consumption has been supported vigorously and reflexively by most governments. The worldwide auto industry has already received $48 billion in direct subsidies. And the G-20 has committed nearly $2 trillion in stimulus monies.

But the problem with stimulus is the problem of limits. The notion that economic activity can expand indefinitely in a finite world has been a fundamental source of difference between economists and natural scientists. History seems to agree with the scientists. Indeed, our past is littered with crashed civilizations that have ended in ruin because they have extended themselves beyond the sustaining capacity of their environments. The pertinent question today is whether or not we are seeing cracks in our own civilization as increasing global economic activity collides with the reality of nature's limits.

George Monbiot, a prominent British author and environmentalist has issued a facetious and stinging communique on behalf of the G-20, bitterly mocking its failure to comprehend the concept of limits. The resulting environmental and resource crises, he predicts, will each "dwarf the financial crisis". This is a condensed version of his communique: "We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, will use every cent we don't possess to rescue corporate capitalism from its contradictions and set the world economy back onto the path of unsustainable growth. We have already spent trillions of dollars of your money on bailing out the banks, so that they can be returned to their proper functions of fleecing the poor and wrecking the Earth's living systems. Now we're going to spend another $1.9 trillion. As an exemplary punishment for their long record of promoting crises, we will give the [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank even more of your money. These actions constitute the greatest mobilisation of resources to support global financial flows in modern times. Oh ‹ and we nearly forgot. We must do something about the environment. We don't have any definite plans as yet, but we'll think of something in due course" (guardian.co.uk, Apr. 2/09).

If financial greed is the marker for the material greed wrecking the planet's biosphere, then any economic stimulus that doesn't contain a simultaneous reduction in environmental damage is just a strategy for hurrying us to our own demise. As Monbiot wisely observes, "...the economy is merely a measure of our engagement with the environment... [and] continued prosperity is impossible without sustainability."

Sustainability can only be a euphemism for economic growth if such growth functions within nature's limits. The present financial crisis has brought us some insights about how we might reconfigure our economic system so we can live more harmoniously with each other and with our planet. Think of loss as an opportunity for learning and change.